A storm erupted on Rand Paul’s announcement day for the presidential nomination when Chris Matthews decried the neocon opposition to Paul, “piggish money” that is against him because he’s against another Middle East war.

Jewish orgs need to be liberated from the power of conservative donors’ money over their political positions. Eric Fingerhut of Hillel boycotted J Street because “millions of dollars” were on the line, an anonymous Hillel director says.

In an interview with Tom Friedman of the New York Times, President Obama shows that he has won on foreign policy, speaking warmly of Iran and repeatedly referring to differences with Netanyahu in a kind of goodbye to the Israel lobby

The US and Israel share a common outlook, calling for continuous military interventionism outside each country’s borders with increased exercise of authority by the military and other security services within their borders. This is no accident. It can be traced back to joint right-wing extremist efforts in both countries with American neoconservatives playing key roles.

The New York Times has finally done it: an honest piece about the Israel lobby’s financial influence over Congress, the Republican side of the aisle, anyway. Netanyahu’s influence among Republicans reflects the power of “a small group of wealthy donors.”

The flat assumption in a NYT piece that Netanyahu can turn the volume up or down in Congress at will may be a true assumption. But why aren’t the networks telling us this? And where is the outrage?

New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren suggests Obama owes some sort of compensation to Israel for not kowtowing to Netanyahu on Iran. The Times did not get the message that Netanyahu got knocked down, left behind and hung out to dry in Lausanne, Switzerland two days ago. He’s been demoted, not the other way around.

Israel created an apartheid system and became an apartheid state at the end of the 1967 war, 48 years ago. It’s high time that we, as Americans, face up to the fact that our military, economic, and diplomatic support of that country is support for apartheid, abetting nearly half a century of oppression of 4.5 million Palestinians.

In a NY Review of Books piece that describes “proto-fascist” currents in the last Israeli election, David Shulman never uses the nickname “Bibi” for Netanyahu. But the editors of the journal do so twice in headlines, surely out of some lingering affection for the Jewish strongman